Dumb Guns
If you wouldn’t think twice about finding rap stars hanging out in a bar in the Amazon jungle, if you’d agree that a prudent way to make a recalcitrant prisoner talk is tying him upside-down from a helicopter and dunking him in the sea, if you’d pass it off as…
Peter X
An opening image in Stepping Razor — Red X, a disappointing biography of reggae legend Peter Tosh, is graffiti on a Jamaican boulder reading “You are sound as a rock.” Perhaps that was true of the late singer/ activist (1944-1987) — would that it were of this sketchy documentary. First-time…
Just Don’t Breathe It
A good part of Houston’s air-pollution problem is, well, Houston: almost one-third of Space City’s ground-level ozone pollutants are produced by automobiles, trucks and buses. Years ago, during the black-gold rush of the ’70s and early ’80s, the sprawl and far-as-the-eye-can-see traffic were often a point of perverse pride. Now…
Coming Out Aloft
You might say I have cow phobia,” explains Rob Miller, a member of the Tri-Angels, a Houston-based gay and lesbian skydiving team. “Call it ‘moo phobia,’ if you will.” Floating about 4,000 feet above the earth — on just his second free-fall jump — Miller found himself in a real…
Letters
Westward Bound Michael Berryhill’s excellent story on the Katy Prairie [“The Fight to Save the Katy Prairie, January 20] omits one significant question: why should public money be spent to spawn more real estate development when our real estate market is already so dreadfully overbuilt? Expensive infrastructure projects like the…
English Renaissance
With the release of Beauty, Paul English’s first CD, the local jazz pianist is poised to earn broader national recognition for the lyrical, rhythmically varied piano style and compositions that local jazz fans have known for years. English’s newly founded Capstone Records — “a microbrewery label” that emphasizes quality over…
Rounder Rock
Thrill-Billy Bop The Rounders Major Records There are things in this town — as in all towns — that are so regular, so consistent, so ever-present and so thoroughly accessible as to be completely unremarkable. There are restaurants you’d never think of as destinations, even though the floor of your…
Good Keen Fun
I don’t want to write about the Keenlies. I mean, I really don’t want to write about the Keenlies. For one thing, certain of the band-members are friends of mine, and that situation always raises the ugly specter of the journalist’s black hole: Conflict of Interest. So, reader be warned:…
Houston Haggis
The perverse imp in me has always wanted to eat haggis, and on January 25 — Scottish bard Robbie Burns’ birthday — I finally got to. The celebrated mega-sausage of sheep’s entrails cooked with oats inside a sheep’s stomach was a featured attraction at Michael and Glenn Cordua’s second annual…
Press Picks
thursday february 3 Houston Rockets vs. L.A. Lakers As if Los Angeles doesn’t have enough problems — now it has not one but two lousy basketball teams. The once-proud purple and gold are definitely reeling, currently tied for last place in the Pacific Division. Word out of the fabulous Forum…
Lotsa Pasta
On paper, Semolina is a great idea. Billing itself as an “international pasta bar,” this hyper-eclectic world-o’-noodles operation has been a big hit in New Orleans; restaurant critic Gene Bourg of the city’s Times Picayune says he has witnessed people virtually fighting to get into Semolina’s Magazine Street restaurant, one…
Between the Idea and the Reality
Jane Martin’s 1993 play, Keely and Du, currently in an engrossing production on the Alley’s Arena Stage, takes on directly and viscerally one of the most troubling moral and political problems of our time: abortion. Set in the present in an unfinished basement in an unidentified American city, it portrays…
Weill in America
In the middle of Houston Grand Opera’s production of Street Scene, I heard something I’ve never heard before in many years as an opera-goer: the audience responded with a collective intake of breath to what had just been said onstage. Not to some grisly act, just to an insult given…
Loopy Lucia
Gaetano Donizetti’s 1835 opera Lucia di Lammermoor has never recommended itself to critical taste. Even by late 19th-century standards, this Romeo and Juliet-ish melodrama seemed hopelessly dated. Today, one still wonders if the opening chorus of Scots singing “Let the veil be torn from this shameful mystery — honor demands,…
Art of Contradiction — Art of Change
Anyone familiar with Dean Ruck’s rough-and-tumble installations will probably expect something on the order of shredded hay bales rather than the nine discrete sculptures the Houston artist has selected for his exhibition at Hiram Butler Gallery. But whereas Ruck’s site-specific works have often taken the viewer as their focus and…
8 1/2 Fellini Films
Not much has been left unsaid about Federico Fellini. If ever there has been a filmmaker for whom a “lifetime achievement” Oscar was a career footnote rather than a capper, it was the visionary Italian. The Rice Media Center’s retrospective in his honor is either an interesting mix or an…